Freeware, shareware, and low-cost utilities make Windows 95 what it should have been in the first place
Stanford Diehl
Welcome to Windows 95.1. You cannot find it on store shelves or in a Microsoft brochure; it's spread out on BBSes, on-line services, and World Wide Web sites around the world. It comprises small, focused utilities that add key functionality to the Win 95 user interface (UI). Some of these features deliver what we expected from the UI back in August, when Win 95 launched. And, in fact, Microsoft itself now provides some of the feature enhancements in a freeware bundle put together by the original Win 95 development team.
Powerize 95
You've certainly got to wonder whether
the Power Toys suite of utilities, which is available free of charge from the Microsoft site (
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/software.htm
), includes features that simply arrived too late to ship with the initial release of Win 95. The Power Toys are simple -- but highly convenient -- UI enhancements.
For sure, most of us expected to get on-the-fly resolution and color-depth switching as part of the original UI. That capability didn't ship with Win 95 but now arrives in the form of a Power Toy dubbed Quickres. At BYTE, we often need to switch quickly among resolutions and color depths. For instance, we might normally run Windows in 256 colors for optimum performance and switch to true-color mode to preview images or capture screens. It's a painful process that requires you to reboot
Windows each time you need a new desktop configuration.
With Quickres, you just point to the icon in the notification bar (at the bottom right of the screen) and select the bit depth and resolution from the pop-up menu. The desktop adopts the new parameters instantly. It's a big time-saver.
EzDesk, a $15 shareware utility, is a perfect companion for Quickres. After switching resolutions, you usually have to rearrange your desktop layout, especially when you flip to a lower resolution (e.g., changing from 1024 by 768 pixels to 640 by 480) and find that Windows has stacked folders on top of each other to make room for everything. EzDesk lets you save multiple desktop layouts to match resolutions. You can store one layout for your 640 by 480 desktop, and another for your 1024 by 768 desktop.
Together, Quickres and EzDesk make resolution switching fast and painless. After the single-click switch in Quickres, EzDesk pops up a window, asking if you want to apply the stored layout for the new re
solution. Another click arranges your desktop, and you're ready to go back to work.
Other Power Toys utilities include the following:
-- TweakUI 1.0 controls
additional UI settings (
see the screen
) not available in Win 95.
-- CABfile Viewer peeks
into the Windows *.CAB files (compressed files you'll find on the Win 95 installation CD and floppies) and performs normal shell operations (e.g., dragging and dropping and renaming).
-- An Explore from Here right-click option launches
the Explorer from a selected folder instead of from the root directory (the Win 95 default).
More UI Enhancements
Apart from the Microsoft stuff, there are a few other good utilities that enhance the Win 95 interface. WinHacker 95, a shareware utility from Wedge Software, controls settings for many hidden Win 95 options. It duplicates some of TweakUI's features but adds other significant capabilities, including one-click
access to the Windows Registry, customization options for the boot menu, and icon-title word wrap. It can also automatically generate icons for BMP files from the images themselves, creating convenient thumbnail views of image files.
Best of all, WinHacker can tune Windows 3.x applications to run better under Win 95. The utility can increase the allotted stack space for legacy applications or, in some cases, report a different Windows version number to an application to keep it happy.
If you sometimes find it easier to shell out to a DOS prompt to run some commands or programs, you'd appreciate a Win 95 command-line utility. There are some good ones available. The popular 4DOS utilities from JP Software (renamed Take Command/32) now run under Win 95 and support an enhanced command set, customizable commands, batch-programming tools, and keystroke aliases.
We also like SmilerShell/95, a $29.95 command-line utility from Bardon Data Systems, because of its convenience and simplicity. Smiler
Shell places a small icon on the title bar of the active application. You just click on the icon to launch a small vertical command-line interface, where you then type in any DOS or Windows command. Or you can call up a command-history window to select previously entered commands. Like Take Command/32, the SmilerShell supports aliases, multiple commands on one line, pipes and redirection, and command-line parameters. You can save the command stack as a loadable batch or as a default set of commands on start-up.
Some smaller utilities add specific UI functions. Place a shortcut to Chris Bluethman's Shutdown 1.5 utility on the desktop, and you can shut down Win 95 with a quick double-click. Run the program from a command line (or the SmilerShell) and add parameters to restart your computer, to boot into MS-DOS mode, or to run a batch file before shutting down.
Sapphire's WinShade 1.5 saves precious desktop space by collapsing open windows to a single vertical bar. As first seen in Apple's System 7
and Corel's roll-up palettes, WinShade shrinks an application or an open folder to its smallest vertical size when you click on the title bar.
Turbo Browsing
File management in Win 95 isn't bad enough to make us long for the Windows 3.x File Manager, but it can get clunky when you're trying to perform extensive file operations. There are plenty of file management utilities out there, but we think
Turbo Browser
from Pacific Gold Coast is one of the best. It's inexpensive ($49.95), intuitive, and, while it effectively mimics the Explorer interface, it adds key functionality to Win 95.
Like the Explorer, the Turbo Browser utility displays computers and drives in one pane and files and folders in an adjoining frame. You can perform file operations by accessing a right-click menu, dragging and dropping, or manually entering a destination directory for file moves. As you select files, they appear in a Preview Window.
Turbo Browser supports file conversio
ns across most of the common Windows file formats (e.g., BMP, PCX, TIF, GIF, JPEG, Photo CD, Targa, Encapsulated PostScript, and Windows Metafiles). You can even extract ASCII text directly out of word processor documents and spreadsheets, sending the text to the Clipboard.
Turbo Browser can create and extract ZIP files across multiple directories, and a powerful search function supports fuzzy searches and Boolean operators. But the most powerful feature of Turbo Browser is its Qbar. You drag files onto the Qbuttons to create batch-file operations. For instance, you can drag files into the ConvertQ to convert multiple files at once, or drop files into the ZipQ to conveniently build an archive. Like the Windows taskbar, the Qbar can remain on-screen and work with other applications. This is another real time-saver.
The Paint Whitewash
Microsoft made some minor improvements to the Win 95 Paint applet, but not enough to make it truly useful. Aside from being a child's painting toy
, MS-Paint doesn't offer much of anything to help with even low-end imaging.
Upgrading to a Win 95 image editor is expensive, requires acres of disk space, and includes more functionality than most business users require. But at just $69, Paint Shop Pro, a shareware program from Jasc, consumes about 3.5 MB of disk space (less than a megabyte for the executable) and delivers enough power to handle most imaging needs short of professional graphics applications.
Paint Shop Pro fills a couple of MS-Paint's flagrant weaknesses with its native support of over 30 file formats and its rich screen-capture functions. What's more, some of the program's fancy features compete with those of higher-end image editors. It has an impressive set of special-effects filters, including posterize, solarize, mosaic, emboss, sharpen, and various distortions. Special painting tools simulate crayon, felt-tip marker, fine-point pen, and chalk. A batch facility allows you to queue up multiple files for format conversion.
A companion browser generates thumbnails of available images on disk, and Paint Shop Pro provides adequate masking, editing tools, and zoom functions. Some high-end features, such as color separations, are not available, but the program loads quickly, conserves resources, and works well as a replacement for the paltry MS-Paint.
Clean Windows
There's just no doubt about it: Managing the disk clutter and configuration files of Windows 3.x is a nightmare. Microsoft sought to change all that with the Win 95 Registry and by requiring that all Win 95-certified applications include an uninstall component.
Certainly, these measures improve the outlook, somewhat like upgrading a patient's status from desperate to critical. But you've still got old Windows 3.x programs hanging around, which means you have both a Registry and the old INI files to keep track of. And although the Registry tracks installed applications and shared components, it does have some management weaknesses.
The Registry uses a counter to monitor the number of applications sharing components, such as DLLs. But the counter doesn't track legacy applications and other software that's not yet Win 95-compliant. There's also no requirement to scan for changes to an installed application's state.
In other words, you might add features through an application via a Preferences menu that taps into a shared library. But the Registry's counters would then be inaccurate, because the Registry doesn't dynamically scan application usage. The application that originally installed the DLL could then remove it during deinstallation, and the feature you added to the dependent application would break. The bottom line: We still strongly recommend a good uninstall utility as an essential part of a Win 95 tools arsenal.
Just as there are plenty of file management utilities to choose from, the market is flush with uninstallers. BYTE editors have settled on two of these programs to handle the daunting task of keeping our
Windows clean: MicroHelp's UnInstaller and CleanSweep 95 from Quarterdeck. BYTE's senior contributing editor Jerry Pournelle swears by CleanSweep, and other editors have had good experiences with UnInstaller. Both programs work well and provide all the basic functions required from an uninstaller.
After using both of these utilities in the lab, we found UnInstaller to be more thorough, but CleanSweep was faster, and its interface is more intuitive. Either will help keep your Win 95 environment from bogging down with superfluous files and an overloaded configuration.
CyberMedia's First Aid 95 includes features for cleaning up your Windows environment, although it's not as thorough as a dedicated uninstaller. However, First Aid can do some other cool tricks. For instance, it checks your Windows configuration and fixes potential problems. It alerts you to file extensions that don't have applications associated with them, to shortcuts that no longer point to valid applications, and to performance p
arameters that are not optimized. First Aid maintains a fairly extensive knowledge base of applications that it can check for errors, as well as a large database of technical-support telephone numbers.
The program can also run its Crash Protector utility in the background. Crash Protector traps Windows faults (e.g., a General Protection Fault or a divide-by-zero error) that might normally freeze your computer and trash unsaved data. Thus, instead of facing an unrecoverable crash, you can return to your application and save your data before shutting down normally.
Windows 96
You can make the Win 95 UI much more convenient with a few well-chosen utilities. Be careful, though: Keep only the ones that let you work the way you want to.
Watch out for utilities that lodge in the Startup folder and consume valuable resources. And if you download several files from the Internet, invest in good virus-protection software that dynamically scans your Windows environment, such as Nort
on Anti-Virus, Dr. Solomon's Toolkit, or McAfee Virus Scan.
PRODUCT INFORMATION
CleanSweep 95...................$29.95
Quarterdeck Corp.
Marina del Rey, CA
Phone: (310) 309-3700
Fax: (310) 309-4219
E-Mail:
info@qdeck.com
Internet:
http://www.qdeck.com
Circle 1098 on Inquiry Card.
EzDesk for Windows 95...........$15.00
Melissa Nguyen
Pomona, CA
Phone: (909) 629-8404
E-Mail:
70571.637@compuserve.com
Circle 1099 on Inquiry Card.
First Aid 95....................$49.95
CyberMedia
Santa Monica, CA
Phone: (310) 581-4700
Fax: (310) 581-4720
Circle 1100 on Inquiry Card.
Pa
int Shop Pro..................$69.00
Jasc, Inc.
Eden Prairie, MN
Phone: (800) 622-2793 or (612) 930-9171
Fax: (612) 930-9172
E-Mail:
74774,570@compuserve.com
Internet:
http://www.jasc.com
Circle 1101 on Inquiry Card.
Power Toys......................free
Microsoft Corp.
Redmond, WA
Phone: (206) 882-8080
Fax: (206) 635-6100
Internet:
http://www.microsoft.com/
Circle 1102 on Inquiry Card.
Shutdown 1.5....................$10.00
Chris Bluethman
Stillwater, OK
E-Mail:
72347.3306@compuserve.com
Circle 1103 on Inquiry Card.
SmilerShell/95..................$29.95
Bardon Data Systems
Albany, CA
Phone: (800) 242-4775 or (510) 526-8470
E-Mail:
72340.375@compuserve.com
Circle 1104 on Inquiry Card.
Take Command/32.................$69.00
JP Software, Inc.
East Arlington, MA
Phone: (617) 646-3975
Fax: (617) 646-0904
E-Mail:
75020.244@compuserve.com
Circle 1105 on Inquiry Card.
Turbo Browser for Windows 95....$49.95
Pacific Gold Coast Corp.
Glen Cove, NY
Phone: (516) 759-3011
Fax: (516) 759-3014
E-Mail:
74777.3450@compuserve.com
Circle 1106 on Inquiry Card.
UnInstaller for Windows 95......$29.95
MicroHelp, Inc.
Marietta, GA
Phone: (770) 516-0899
Fax: (770) 516-1099
E-Mail:
74774.55@compuserve.com
Circle 1107 on Inquiry Card.
WinHacker 95.....................$9.95
Wedge Software
Davisburg, MI
E-Mail:
wh95@wojo.com
Circle 1108 on Inquiry Card.
WinShade 1.5.....................$5.00
Sapphire
Cambridge, MA
E-Mail:
lemmings@mit.edu
Circle 1109 on Inquiry Card.
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Stanford Diehl was until recently the director of BYTE reviews. He currently works at New England Business Service's Peterborough, New Hampshire, division. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
sdiehl@bix.com
.
Underground Upgrades for Windows 95
